This is an eclectic blog in which I discuss whatever in the world happens to be on my mind today.

Monday, May 24, 2010

Rampant intellectual dishonesty? Or just politics as usual?

Only ten short years ago the budget of this country was in the black. We had a substantial surplus and things were looking really bright for the future of the country. Then came the selection of a new president by the Supreme Court in 2000 and things began to turn around.

Over the next eight years, through two expensive wars, one of them totally unnecessary, through unfunded drug programs and various other unfunded initiatives, and through tax cuts that allowed the richest people and corporations in the country to pay minimal taxes, all of the surplus was used up and we sank into the red. Way into the red.

Meantime, a refusal to regulate financial institutions, oil and other energy companies was driving the overall economy into a very deep ditch, taking ordinary citizens along for the plunge.

Now that the country has been driven into debt and to the brink of ruin by the policies of that Supreme Court selected president, so-called libertarians and patriots are screaming about the state of the nation and yelling that they want to take the country back. But I wonder, where were their protests when all of this was happening?

I don't remember any noisy demonstrations by today's loud protestors about the state of the economy before Barack Obama took office. In fact, the eight previous years had been marked by their virtually total acquiescence and support for everything the administration was doing. Thus, they were, in fact, complicit in the results achieved by the policies of that administration. And NOW they choose to complain about those results!

Is this just another example of politics as usual, i.e, when your guy is in office everything is wonderful but when the other party's guy is elected he gets blamed for everything bad whether he really had anything to do with it or not? Or do they truly not understand how all of these things came to be?

Put another way, can these people truly be as intellectually dishonest as they seem to be? Yes, I'm very much afraid that they can be.